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Sunday, 29 March 2015

Full Thrust: Needle in a Nebula AAR 1

As part of our ongoing narrative Full Thrust campaign, C put together a scenario based on the outcome of our last game. The basic premise was that the damage sustained by the stealth ship due to the other vessels mis-jumps near it had caused critical damage to it's own FTL drive, causing it to be spat out of FTL before it reached it's destination.

NAC intel got wind of this - and despite some rather dubious characters attempting to delay any NAC response - dispatched the RNS Blore Heath to meet with other rapid response G-5 Sector ships and secure the cloaking UGC vessel.

We played this game twice, the first time being an unmitigated disaster for the NAC. Fielding a Light Cruiser, Strike Cruiser and Destroyer I was wiped out. The only saving grace had been a boarding of the stealth vessel that left is scuttled before any useful data had been recovered from it by the UGC and the destruction of one UGC frigate. C's main ship was a UGC deep space standby vessel. Complete with Advanced shields and drives, I couldn't touch it - while it's own firepower annihilated my ships one volley at a time.The advanced drives meant the advantage I had in maneuverability was lost as well.

Post game discussion we decided that it might be worth looking at the CPV rather than the NPV points system for Full Thrust. Basically NPV is the standard points buy system, but it favours large ships as due to the way the points system works they are more points efficient per weapon and hull point. Under NPV one 400 point ship is far more effective than two 200 point or four 100 point ships.

CPV works by assigning points to the combat systems of the ship, making larger hulls costlier and smaller ships more efficient. It has the downside of making smaller ships more effective - possibly leading to a situation where it's better to have 10 destroyers than 1 Super-dreadnought. However, we felt that given the smaller scale games we are playing it makes more sense to use CPV. The other side effect is it means it makes much more sense to escort larger vessels with smaller ones, rather than just using large ships on their own.

The other issue with the first game was the tech used on C's ship. To be fair, we had not talked about when in the FT timeline we were setting our scenarios, and C is not as familiar with the FT timeline than I am. This meant he wasn't aware that the Advanced Drives listed in the Full Thrust Continuum rules are actually a Kra'Vak system and not used by Human ships in the fluff. Having decided on a time period (just prior to the Xenos War) we agreed that he could use the advanced shields as they fitted the UGC doctrine - and the fact that the corporations major investments would be well protected by the best (prototype) tech.

C had also painted up some of his ships. These are from the Brigade 'British' range.

So, having gone over bits and bobs from the game, we set up again and re-ran. One of the other changes being an escalation of the NAC response, meaning I had 650 points vs the UGC 500 points. The NAC response this time consisted of the Light Cruiser RNS Blore Heath, the Escort Carrier RNS Cambuslang and two Destroyer's as escorts. Tune in to part 2 for the battle!

As for our first game, here are some pictures showing the layout - random flight stands dotted about represented sensor contacts that could not be identified until a ship was in sensor range. These varied from mines to metallic asteroids and other such things.

Initial NAC Deployment - Blore Heath on the left with the Strike Cruiser Cambuslang and destroyer on the right.

RNS Blore Heath detects the enemy vessels.

The NAC disposition when the enemy were detected.

NAC ships start to maneuver to engage - detecting some steel constructed targets in the shape of Japanese ships. The NAC Light Cruiser has managed to put boarding teams aboard the stealth vessel on the way past (over on the left).

High speed pass from the Strike Cruiser does no damage to the UGC vessel, despite several Beam 2 and Pulse Torp batteries firing at point blank range.

NAC ships scatter to try and get into better positions. The UGC ship can turn on a dime and with several class 3 Beam's and Pulse Torps can do huge damage. The NAC Destroyer does manage to take out the already damaged UGC frigate.

The NAC vessels try to stay in the cover of the asteroids. Some nail biting turns plotted here. Hitting a 'roid is fatal. We also play line of site from peg to peg, and asteroids block LoS.

The Strike Cruiser lines up while the Light Cruiser takes a pounding, accelerating hard with lots of damage taken.

The Light Cruiser loops round to try and collect the boarding teams - I plot the damaged Strike Cruisers turn poorly and it gets wiped out. The Light Cruiser gets to the target just as the UGC vessel turns towards it. The Destroyer had died earlier in the fight and although the NAC ship managed to pick up the boarding parties, it had suffered a life support critical and a turn later the crew were forced to abandon ship... Game over and a total loss for the NAC!

3 comments:

Hi,Just stumbled onto this Battle Report. I'm a long time fan of Full Thrust and our gaming group is getting back into it.Can i ask where you got that plastic/acrylic turn and fire arc template from? That's fantastic!